Rich's 'This Was SportsCenter' - Chris Berman - Season 1, Episode 2

For the first live taping of This Was SportsCenter, in front of a packed Strand Theater in San Francisco during Super Bowl week, Rich brought out the one guest the season could not do without. Susie Schuster introduced her husband, Rich introduced the Swami, and Chris Berman, in his 47th year at ESPN, sat down to walk through how all of it began. The proceeds went to the Jimmy V Foundation, which felt right for a night this warm.

Berman's origin story is smaller than the legend. In 1979 he was a second-year radio guy in Waterbury, Connecticut, doing a nighttime sports talk show and reading traffic reports, plus weekend work at the NBC station in Hartford for $23 a show. He heard about a sports network starting up the road in Bristol, interviewed, and got hired as the overnight man. The offer was $16,000. Berman, acting as his own agent for the first and last time, countered with $16,500 since they would not have to move him, and got it. He started October 1, 1979, a few weeks after the network signed on.

The concept, as it was pitched to him, was a 15 or 20 minute wrap-up at the end of the night. Berman's reaction was disbelief that they would do 30 full minutes of just sports when Walter Cronkite covered the entire world in the same window. He called the original crew the seven Mercury astronauts, a group that included Bob Ley and the late Tom Mees, and admitted they had no clue what they were doing. The stories prove it. A skunk got into the unfinished studio one fall and the smell lingered for two weeks, so they did shows coughing through it. On another night, tape-delayed college football was running so far behind that the tape room rolled the wrong reel, and Berman had to ad-lib his way back to "action late in the first quarter" of a game whose final he already knew.

That chaos became a phenomenon by riding cable's growth. Berman laid out the math for the younger fans in the room. In 1979, paying $20 a month for 36 channels when you got five for free made no sense, until people started doing it. By the early 1980s the audience was eight to ten million, and Berman could feel it through fan letters and the waiters on the West Coast who watched his football picks after their shifts. By 1987 the network had the NFL, Sunday Night Football, and NFL PrimeTime.

He had the same affection for the draft, which ESPN first televised in 1980 when, as Berman recalled, commissioner Pete Rozelle likened the idea to reading the Manhattan phone book and the network argued back that it was their one chance to have a day of the NFL. For football fans, he said, it became an oasis in the middle of a six-month desert, and Rich, who has hosted it for NFL Network for 23 years, credited Berman as the original.

The throughline of the night was a simple philosophy. "We're not smart enough to be anybody else," Berman said, "so why wouldn't we be ourselves." Rich made it personal with a story from his 1996 start as a SportsCenter trainee, when he was too nervous to sign the charity banners and finally asked Berman in the makeup chair how many SportsCenters he needed to do first. Berman asked how many he had done, answered it himself with "at least one," and told him to sign them all. Rich grabbed a Sharpie and never thought twice again.

Berman, now semi-retired and sticking to football and PrimeTime, joked that they underpaid him for 20 years and overpaid him for 20, so it is a wash. He also reflected on why the work matters, calling sports, like music, one of the few things that fits all shapes and sizes, a conversation any stranger can join. By the end, the two of them agreed to reunite for one more SportsCenter, one night only, so Rich can finally rectify the Berman-style nickname he botched the last time they shared a desk.